Posts Tagged ‘Brighton and Hove’

In an article attacking the decision of the Green members of Brighton and Hove’s council to adopt the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism, Tony Greenstein quoted a number of senior Israeli figures – Naftali Bennett, the minister for education, Avigdor Liberman, Netanyahu’s wretched defence minister, to show how they matched Nazi pronouncements against the Jews. In so doing, they conformed to what the Israeli Orthodox religious scholar, Yeshayahu Leibowitz termed ‘Judeonazism’. Greenstein wrote

In an interview with The Times of Israel it was reported that Israel’s Education Minister, Naftali Bennett, had stated that ‘he would instruct the IDF to shoot and kill any Palestinians who cross into the country from Gaza’. When questioned as to whether or not that would also apply to children Bennett responded ‘“They are not children — they are terrorists. We are fooling ourselves. I see the photos.” Bennett says IDF should shoot to kill Gazans who cross border [8.10.18]

The statement of Bennett, who is the leader of HaBayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home), a religious settlers’ party, is that of a Nazi. It is reminiscent of Himmler’s speech to Nazi leaders in the Polish city of Posnan on October 6th 1943 when he explained why the killings had to include Jewish children: “I did not assume to have the right to exterminate the men… and have the avengers personified in the children to become adults for our children and grandchildren.”[Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p.259]

Palestinian children to Bennett are no different from Jewish children to Himmler. To both they represent the devil in child form. That was why Israeli polymath and orthodox religious scholar, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz described the settlers as Judeo-Nazis. Naftali Bennett is a prime example of a Judeo-Nazi. He subscribes to a racial philosophy of Jewish supremacism no different from Nazi ideology.

But under the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ can be anti-Semitic even though Israelis regularly make such comparisons themselves. For example even Deputy Chief of Staff General Yair Golan at a Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration two years ago caused a storm when he stated that

‘If there’s something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it’s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016. IDF Deputy Chief Likens ‘Revolting Trends’ in Israeli Society to pre-Holocaust Germany.

Another member of Netanyahu’s Cabinet, Defence Minister Avigdor Liberman remarked that he would like nothing more than to see the drowning of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea. Again the label Judeo Nazi would be apt. His Deputy as Defence Minister, Rabbi Eli Dahan is also no slouch. In a radio interview he explained that to him Palestinians ‘“are like animals, they aren’t human.” and that “A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile [non-Jew] , even if he is a homosexual,”

To understand the full import of the above it is important to recognize that for Orthodox Jews being gay is an abomination which merits the death penalty, but even a gay Jew has a ‘much higher soul’ than a non-Jew. These are just some of the people who inhabit the present Israeli cabinet. Yet to call them what they are, Judeo-Nazis is anti-Semitic under the shabby, incoherent and contradictory collection of words that goes under the title of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

Greenstein’s article contains links to a piece in the liberal Israeli paper, Haaretz, describing just how Netanyahu’s administration and the Israel it has created conforms to Professor Leibowitz’s concept, and to the Wikipedia entry on him.

Leibowitz was professor of biochemistry, organic chemistry and neurophysiology at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, as well as a prolific writer on Jewish and Western philosophy. He also passionately believed in the separation of religion from state. In a 1968 essay, ‘The Territories’, he predicted a chilling future for Israel as a totalitarian, colonialist surveillance state. According to Wikipedia, he wrote

The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Forces, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.

While the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism forbids comparing Jews to Nazis as anti-Semitic, the comparisons are there, as Greenstein has pointed out many times. And Israeli politicians, including Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, have regularly accused each other and the Israeli premier of being Nazis.

The I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism also forbids holding Israel to higher standards than other countries. This again is intended to prevent or stifle criticism of Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. But as far back as 1905 H.G. Wells attacked Jewish racism alongside that of the English, the Germans and the Italians in his book, A Modern Utopia. The book is a quasi-science fictional description of Wells’ ideas about what would constitute the ideal state. Wells himself believed passionately in a global, world government, in which all the races of humanity would share a common language and culture, and would live, work, study and move around the globe freely in peace and harmony. The chapter ‘Race in a Modern Utopia’ is one long diatribe against racism and racial prejudice which still remains acutely relevant. It is marred only by the fact that Wells was a eugenicist, who did believe that the undeserving poor and ‘inferior’ races should be prevented from breeding. In practice, however, he felt that even those races considered inferior at the time, Australian Aborigines and the Khoisan peoples of South Africa, would still contain skilled individuals, who would be allowed to have children and contribute to this new, global civilization.

About the growing European racism in his time, he wrote

And just now, the world is in a sort of delirium about race and the racial struggle. The Briton forgetting his Defoe, the Jew forgetting the very word proselyte, the German forgetting his anthropometric variations and the Italian forgetting everything, are obsessed by the singular purity of their blood, and the danger of contamination the mere continuance of other races involves. True to the law that all human aggregation involves the spirit of opposition to whatever is external to the aggregation, extraordinary intensifications of racial definition are going on; the vileness, the inhumanity, the incompatibility of alien races is being steadily exaggerated. The natural tendency of every human being towards a stupid conceit in himself and his kind, a stupid depreciation of all unlikeness, is traded upon by this bastard science. With the weakening of national references, and with the pause before reconstruction in religious belief, these new arbitrary and unsubstantial race prejudices become daily more formidable. They are shaping policies and modifying laws, and they will certainly be responsible for a larger proportion of the wars, hardships and cruelties the immediate future holds in store for our earth. (pp. 118-9, my emphasis).

Wells’ predictions have horrifically been born out. In Africa, just a few years after Wells wrote this, the Germans embarked on a deliberate campaign to exterminate the Herrero in Africa. Then there were the Armenian massacres by the Turks, which convinced Hitler that he could murder the Jews without consequence from the other nations. And even after the War, Mosley was drawing on respected scientists to show that certain races were inferior, and therefore Blacks and other peoples should not be allowed to mix and intermarry with White Britons.

And across the world, including Israel, Fascism is rising again. Including Israel, which is quite prepared to support the Fascistic regimes in Poland and Hungary with their venomous hatred of Jews, Muslims, immigrants and Roma. Dr. Who last Sunday remined us of the courage and achievement of Rosa Parks in challenging racial oppression. And H.G. Wells, one of the ancestors of the series through his The Time Machine, still remains acutely relevant in his denunciation of racism today.

And as Wells, Prof. Leibowitz and Tony Greenstein, amongst others, have shown, Jewish Fascism exists alongside its gentile forms, and all have to be fought and combated.

Last night, Mike over at Vox Political has posted a piece reporting that the police have declined to investigate those, who libelled him as a anti-Semite the other week in order to prevent his election as a local councillor for Radnorshire. Mike had asked the Powys police to investigate them, as libelling someone’s personal character and behaviour to interfere with their chances in an election is a crime under the 1983 Local Government Act.

However, Mike received a message from the local rozzers stating that they had contacted John Stolliday of the Labour Party Compliance Unit, who told them that make had been suspended pending a formal investigation. The flatfeet therefore concluded that it would be ‘inappropriate’ to engage in an investigation.

Mike has replied to them, stating that this excuse does not stand up as the libels were made against him personally for his activities outside the Labour party, and asked for the name of his superior officer if the plod he has been dealing with so far is not up to the job.

He concludes

You can’t see this but I am actually shaking with rage at the injustice of this.

It seems to me that the officer concerned either can’t be bothered or is actually seeking to pervert the course of justice.

I am extremely disappointed, like Mike’s many other friends and supporters, to hear this. But I am not surprised. It seems to me that the reason the cops don’t want to pursue this investigation is because it’s too much of a hot potato. This is just my speculation, but it strikes me that they don’t want to run the risk of being seen to interfere in a complex political dispute involving accusations of racism. The police force generally down the years has acquired something of a reputation for institutional racism – not, I should mentioned, in Powys, but simply generally – and it strikes me strongly that this officer is afraid that if he defends Mike, he risks his career by being accused of anti-Semitism himself.

And so he hopes that if he doesn’t do anything, somehow it’ll all blow over and he can go back to solving normal crimes, which won’t have unpleasant political consequences.

I hope, however, that this will only be a temporary setback for Mike, and that he will manage to get those who smeared him with these appalling allegations brought to account for their crimes.

One of the organisations chiefly responsible for these smears is the woefully misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. This claims to be tackling anti-Jewish hatred in the UK. In reality, it is a Zionist organisation that has no interest whatsoever in combating the real anti-Semites in the NF, BNP, the former National Action and other Fascist groups and parties. It exists solely to silence critics of Israel’s barbarous policy of brutal persecution and expulsion against the indigenous Palestinians. Its tactic in this is to smear decent people making entirely reasonable criticisms and protests as anti-Semites, even when they are sincere anti-racists, including self-respecting secular or Torah observant Jews and their friends and gentile allies.

Their other tactic has been to exaggerate grossly the real level of anti-Semitism amongst the general British and European populations, in order to make Jews feel unsafe and suspicious of the gentile neighbours and compatriots. This is done with the explicit agenda of getting more European Jews to migrate to Israel.

The organisation is also deeply Islamophobic, and has published many articles claiming that British Muslims in particular are anti-Semitic, in ways which, if they were said about Jews, would have them screaming ‘Anti-Semitism!’

Mr Greenstein is a trade unionist, Labour party member, anti-racist and anti-Zionist. He states that he has written a book, The Struggle Against Fascism in Brighton and Hove. While this doesn’t sound very impressive compared to legendary confrontation with the Blackshirts, such as the Battle of Cable Street and the other fights in London’s East End, it does actually show how committed he was to combating the real, jackbooted racism and anti-Semitism when it showed its head. One of the leaders of the NF lived for a time in Brighton back in the 1970s, and its thugs attacked trade unionists, feminists and other left-wing or minority organisations with their habitual violence. They physically attacked the offices of a feminist organisation, which I believed also helped unmarried mothers, and published the names and addresses of local trade unionists in their magazine, until local trade unionists and ethnic minority organisations hit back. So Mr Greenstein and his brothers and sisters in the unions, Labour party and the Left in general did an excellent job of standing up to real, physical thuggery and beating.

Mr Greenstein has also set up an internet petition on Change.org asking the Charity Commission to remove the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s charitable status, as it is a political organisation that does no public good. The petition is at

I’ve signed it, and if you feel strongly about the way Mike, and other decent people like him are being outrageously smeared by this vile, pernicious group, you may also like to.

In the meantime, I wish Mike and everyone else in the Labour party, who has been libelled as an anti-Semite the very best in their campaigns for justice, and to Tony Greenstein for his efforts also to bring them to some kind of account.

And I will certainly be posting more critical articles about them, and similar organisations, and the way they lie and vilify decent, sincerely anti-racist men and women, who genuinely stand up against those who spread hatred against Jews.